When things seem they could get no worse, it is helpful to turn to music for relief.  Long before William Congreve linked music with savage breasts (I am unable to envision such things as SAVAGE breasts), the Roman poet Lucan wrote an epic poem called Parsalia that talked of someone “..whose charming voice and matchless music” moved “the savage beasts, the stones, and senseless trees.”

—beasts, not breasts in the original Latin.

I draw sustenance from a movie song that reminds me all of the hot air emanating from the Asylum on the Potomac amounts to cosmic nothingness.

So the next time you find  your gorge rising (a phrase that was a gift to the English language by William Shakespeare in Hamlet: “I could never be a doctor. Blood, vomit, open wounds—all that stuff makes my gorge rise.”), be comforted and calmed by the internationally famous Galaxy Song.

It begins with this prelude:

“Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, and things seem hard or tough, and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, and you feel that you’ve had quite enough.”  And it continues:

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving,

And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour;

That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,

A sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun and you and me

And all the stars that we can see

Are moving at a million miles a day.

In an outer spiral arm,

At forty-six thousand miles an  hour.

Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

 

Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars

It’s 100,000 light years side to side.

It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick.

But out by us it’s just 3,000 light year wide.

We’re 30,000 light years from our glactic central point.

We go round every 200 million years

And our Galaxy is only one of millions of billions

In this amazing and expanding universe.

 

The Universe itself keeps expanding and expanding

In all of the directions it can whiz

As it can go, at the speed of light. you know..

12 million miles a minute,

and that’s the fastest speed there is.

So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure

How amazingly unlikely is your birth.

And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space

Because there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.

The famous composer/lyricist duo of Eric Idle and John Cleese have given us this musical reminder that on the cosmic scale, it doesn’t matter what idiocy comes from the stable genius. He’s really just a tiny atom in the grand scheme and it would do all of us—citizens, law firms, judges, and schools for starters—to look at him that way.